Coming to you from the mind of Neil Glick (The Brain), a good old fashion, home cooked technical blog regarding storage, virtualization, and anything else that crosses my mind.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Nimble Storage 2.x Setup - Still So Easy Even **I** Can Do It!

Hi Friends,

Awhile back, I wrote a series of blogs regarding how easy it is to set up Nimble Storage. Those were on the 1.x platform and I wanted to show you how easy it is to setup a 2.x array!

You can use the console cable and setup the array with the CLI, but I don't know about you, I've grown to love GUI's! So today I'm going to show you how you go from new array to ready in just a few minutes.

Before your array shows up, it's important to get some information ready for it. Like if you've got a baby on the way. You want to think of a name, set up the baby's room, get a crib, paint and all that good stuff. The cool thing about the Nimble is there's no poopy diapers! So here's what you'll want:

That's it! If you don't have this information it's not like Nimble won't give you your array, kind of like if you don't set up the baby's room the hospital won't not let you take your baby home. It just might be a bit more hectic and challenging when the critter comes home.

Now then! You've got your shiny new array, take some time to show it off to your co-workers, it's a pretty cool product after all.

1. Install Nimble Setup Manager on a Windows host.
2. You'll want the array to be on the network you installed Nimble Setup Manager so it will see the array.
3. Start up Nimble Setup Manager and the array should pop up like this.

4. Select your new array and click Next.
5. Now a small decision. Do you want this array to be in it's own group, or do you want to add it to an existing group? No worries, you can always add it to a group later if you want. This is some of the cool clustering in 2.x. I'm going to select Create a new group.

7. Accept the EULA if you agree with it.
8. We're now done with the Nimble Setup Manager. You're almost there!

9. Now open up a web browser and put in the management IP you entered earlier. Enter the password you created.

10. Remember all those data and discovery IP's? This is where you're going to need them. Depending on your network this can look a lot different from my setup. In my example, I have a management subnet that does not carry data traffic and two iSCSI subnets that only carry data traffic and are jumbo frames.

11. This part is cool. Now you'll select which Nimble ports will use the subnets you just created. Here I'm selecting eth1 as management and tg3 and tg4 (10gig) as my iSCSI data ports. Notice the Diagnostic IP's at the bottom? This is the support IP's you collected earlier. These will help Support login if things go wrong on your array.

12. Enter in your domain name and DNS servers.

13. Select your time zone and the name of your NTP server.

14. Let's enter in our email information for emails and support. Who the email will be from, who to send it to, if you want Nimble Support to get a copy of alerts, what your SMTP server is whether to send AutoSupports to Nimble and if you have an HTTP proxy.

15. You're done!

Now onto the fun part, creating volumes, but I'll save that for another time.